Possibly sensing that danger, my oldest brother, who was living by himself in Fukuoka, a city along the north shore of Kyushu island, sent me an application form for a youth academy trial when I was in my last year at elementary school, thinking I would need a tougher challenge to broaden my horizons.
It just so happened to be the one in Nagoya, a city in the middle of mainland Japan. He’d googled for a youth academy at J.League clubs while looking online for information about a university for which he was going to take an entrance exam, and the only trial calling for applications at that time was the one at the Grampus youth academy.
He never thought I would pass the trial. Everyone around me thought I had no chance, and so did I.
There were 60 or 70 participants on the day of the trial, I think, and four were successful, including myself. Being a boy from a small town in Kyushu, I’d imagined there would be hundreds of kids trialling with a J.League club, so when I saw the actual number that turned up I thought, ‘This is it? Much less than I imagined.’ Maybe that carefree attitude helped me to go through, and this ‘big fish’ from Nagasaki ended up going to the ‘bigger pond’ that was Nagoya.
I was only 12 at that time. I have heard many people saying, ‘It was such a brave decision to leave home at such a young age.’ I still do. People tell me that it was as courageous, if not more so, as the decision I made to move abroad when I was 21. But to be honest, the 12-year-old Maya Yoshida didn’t think he had made such a huge decision. It was more like, ‘I can always come back home after a year or two if it doesn’t work out.’ I was that casual about joining the youth academy in Nagoya.
Given that he was the one who’d sent the life-changing application form to his little brother, my oldest brother may have felt somewhat concerned when I ended up leaving home at the age of 12. But I wasn’t feeling any pressure or responsibility at all, even when it was time to leave Nagasaki.
However, something changed inside me once I arrived in Nagoya. I started feeling the pressure that comes from realising there would be no way for me to go home without achieving anything. I needed to rent a flat to start my life in Nagoya. We also had to buy some basic furniture. In Japan, a flat to let generally means unfurnished. Even a 12-year-old could understand it was costing the Yoshida household good money. The fact that my parents had to spend money because I was joining the academy in a different part of Japan made me think that I could not give up too easily and go back to Nagasaki after only a year or two. Initially, it was more a case of me feeling that I owed it to my parents to persevere than wanting to meet the expectations of my family. I felt strongly that I just could not go home with nothing to show for their financial sacrifices, and that sense of responsibility turned, in the end, into an inner determination to knuckle down to becoming a professional footballer.
Looking back now, I can’t help but wonder how my parents let their youngest son leave home for a city some 400 miles away at that age. I really want to tell them, ‘It was a brave decision.’ Even though Kyushu and mainland Japan are connected by a bridge and an undersea tunnel, to a 12-year-old boy from Nagasaki it was like going to live in a foreign land. I actually flew over to Nagoya. Now I’m a father myself, I can’t imagine letting my daughter go to live in a city away from home when she is only 12 or 13.
However, it wasn’t the case that my parents didn’t care much about letting their youngest son leave home. The plan was that I would live with my cousin’s family in Aichi Prefecture, of which Nagoya is the capital city. That was part of the reason why I was so casual about leaving home; I assumed, ‘I can go to the academy from their home.’ It was only on the day I was leaving for Nagoya accompanied by my mum, already on the plane and in the air, that she told me about ‘something important’. I found out that living with my cousin’s family was no longer an option due to an unforeseeable circumstance at their end. You can imagine my surprise. I was lost for words, except ‘What?!’
At that time, both my mum and dad were working in Nagasaki, and my older brother had just left for Tokyo to go to university. That meant my oldest brother, who was also away but just preparing to take the entrance exam (equivalent of A-level exams in the UK) again, had to come to my rescue to live with me in Nagoya. It was very last minute and so not according to the original plan. But on the other hand, this unexpected development made it easier for me, in a way, to make up my mind to go to Nagoya, as there was no other choice; I had to accept the reality.
So I left my home for Nagoya, where a different kind of resilience from ‘the strength of the youngest’ would be nurtured.
Anti-complex power
The junior youth (aged 12 to 15) set-up at Grampus was at a totally different level from what I was used to in Nagasaki. The moment I joined its Under-12/13 team, I felt a sense of urgency. Watching other players around me, I was shocked at how good they were. They all seemed way ahead of me, and the exceptionally good ones were invited to train with a team in the age group above us. There were four such players in my age group, and I secretly called them ‘the Big Four’. As for me, I was starting from the absolute bottom in the youth ranks. Every day I could not help but feel, ‘I have to get past every one of them, including the Big Four.’
We all got on well as team-mates but we were in competition to climb up the ladder in the academy. So I had to make sure that I wouldn’t be just one of the crowd but a force to be reckoned with through my performances.
It was as if the world I had read about in football manga (Japanese comics) was there right in front of me as the reality.
Every time I made a step forwards, to reach a higher level or rank, there came new rivals. As soon as I thought I had beaten my competition, there was another rival to beat. I tried to keep on running, but hurdles kept on appearing in my path.
The biggest motivation for me when I started out in the academy at Grampus, realising for the first time how fierce the competition would be within the team, was the awareness that I simply could not go back to Nagasaki without giving it proper time. And the fact that I managed to overcome the initial pressure was, I believe, down to my nature. I hate losing. I don’t want to be a loser in whatever I do, so I turn the sense of urgency which comes from thinking ‘I can’t lose’ into positive energy to reach my goal, instead of merely putting even more pressure onto myself. That is how I keep on running this long hurdle race that is the career of a footballer.
I wasn’t a prodigy or an elite youth player who had been developed at the academy of a professional club from the age of six or seven. I was just a kid who played football in a local school team, and I had something of an ‘I-am-a-nobody’ complex when I joined the Grampus academy. So when I saw other academy players, part of me was simply impressed by their abilities while another part was thinking, ‘I don’t want to lose against them no matter what.’ It was the same when I got my first call-up to the national youth team or the Japan senior side. I always had this ‘me against the elites’ feeling inside me.
I believe there are many people with a similar complex around the world, including in Japan and the United Kingdom. I also believe it is possible for anyone to deal with such a feeling of inferiority in a positive way. Thinking that you don’t want to be beaten by it gives you mental strength – ‘anti-complex power’, if I may call it that. And that is certainly a part of the resilience that has helped this Japanese defender end up plying his trade in the Premier League.
By mental strength, I don’t mean something that only a spiritual seeker can master, as though a professional athlete must become a practitioner of stoicism or asceticism. I did try to stay away from snacking and drinking fizzy drinks in my early teens, but what seems equally important to me nowadays, as a professional footballer, in order to develop or use my resilience is being able to switch oneself on and off effectively in one’s daily life. It is more important if you play abroad because you are likely to spend more time by yourself than when you are in your native country, especially right after your transfer to a different country, where thinking about football, about